New Opportunities at New City Fellowship

Work is a gift, and one of the greatest and most unexpected gifts God has given us in Kenya has been the opportunity to get more involved with our church fellowship at New City Nairobi. Because all of our Planting Faith work takes place in villages and towns in rural areas far from our Nairobi home, we have taken on some responsibilities at New City that have opened up incredible chances for us to serve and be served through ministry at our church. Here are a few of the ways we’ve been involved this year:

Worship

I have been involved in leading worship since 7th grade chapel, but leading worship at New City has been rewarding and challenging in ways that none of the college groups, youth groups, chapel services, or church meetings prepared me for. New City’s vision for racial and tribal reconciliation between Asian Kenyans (majority from India) and African Kenyans, and the church’s efforts to reach out evangelistically to the largely unreached Indian communities in Nairobi, requires a level of stylistic, linguistic, and participant diversity beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been leading at least once a month (3 times coming up in May), and in all of those services we sing in at least four different languages with a worship team composed of people from at least five different ethnic backgrounds. During the fast paced Indian songs, complete with the tambala (the traditional Indian bongo looking drums that can sound like drops of water), we often have Indian congregants come up front and dance, and some of our Kiswahili call and response songs get the whole congregation, black, white, brown, and everything else, clapping and dancing wildly before the Lord. But we also sing English praise choruses, old hymns translated into Hindi or Kiswahili, and a few real fun ones that combine all three. Last week we sang “How Great Thou Art” in two languages at the same time. And through it all I’m up there trying to remember how to pronounce words from two or three different languages I don’t speak!

Ben Witherington argues that worship should be fundamentally eschatological: “We worship in the shadow of the kingdom . . . with one eye on the horizon.” And one of the primary signs of the “end times” in the New Testament is the bringing together of every tongue, tribe, and nation before the throne of Jesus. Ephesians tells us that in His resurrected body Christ tore down the wall of hostility and united all peoples in his own new creation second Adam self. So when all of the bizarre, what-the-heck-is-going-on stuff hits the fan (turning around to begin the service and seeing a dude on the drums I’ve never laid eyes on, much less practiced with, or the power going out and turning our worship band into an acapella choir backed by an acoustic guitar and two Indians on really loud traditional drums), and I start hankering for three music majors from Covenant and the Trinity hymnal, I remember that we are supposed t o present our bodies as sacrifices of worship, that our existence together as a radically united community is worship to God, that just by showing up and shouting and crying aloud to Jesus in all of our diversity and brokenness is worship. In my tradition we labor endlessly over the theological accuracy of our songs. But what about the theological accuracy of our style? Shouldn’t our styles in worship reflect the diversity of our personalities and cultural traditions? Shouldn’t we search out and try to include all the gifts of culture and taste that reflect His image? Shouldn’t it sound a bit like the kingdom? Or what about the theological accuracy of our choir? Shouldn’t we look like the people of God in worship?

Some of you can’t even begin to answer those questions because you’re too distracted by imagining me trying to sing in Hindi in front of 100 people. But to my credit, I’ve had some practice by now. In addition to leading worship on Sundays, I’ve also gotten the privilege of leading the singing in our small group that meets every other week, and even to lead at a few Asian outreach events known as Satsangs. A satsang is a traditional Indian fellowship meeting that often has a discussion on spiritual things afterwards. So for instance two weeks ago, I got asked to help lead music for a satsang at an Asian couple’s home because an Indian preacher with a healing ministry was coming to visit (as another missionary friend put it, “wow, that’s like cross-cultural squared). And it was amazing! We got a taste of what the gospel looks like when it’s planted in the rich Indian soil, and to be a part of understanding and replicating it. This is mind bogglingly cool, and when I found out just after we finished that almost none of the Asians there (probably 20-30) were Christians, but were all either Hindu or Muslim I just felt overwhelmed by God’s grace to us.

Hanging with the 20 Somethings

Because I’m an American I went to youth group from ages 12 to 18. I thought that that break down was probably hidden somewhere in the Old Testament, but as it turns out it’s totally cultural. In Kenya, “youth group” means everyone from age 10-35, unless they get married! So at NCF, we have one youth pastor who is responsible for like 50-60 people across a 25 year age range from at least 5 different “tribes and nations.” Small wonder he has started looking for some volunteers to help and asked us to help with the 20-35 age group, with the goal of helping them become a sort of self-sufficient Bible Study group within the church.

So for the last 2.5 months, Becca and I have been meeting regularly with our peers at New City to try to “consider how we can spur one another on towards love and good deeds,” both as a group of age mates and as a group serving within the church. This sounds pretty basic; it’s anything but. You see, at New City we have what can feel like a bipolar social disorder. It goes like this: the predominately poorer Christian African Kenyans don’t get along with the predominately Muslim/Hindu wealthier Asian Kenyans and vice versa, but reconciliation and outreach to unbelievers is the heart of our church’s ministry. This is a bit difficult for us to get our minds around at first because we tend to think of wealthier people being the ones to reach out to poorer ones (probably because we don’t really believe the Sermon on the Mount. Whose is the kingdom again?), but that’s the way it is here. So in our church of Asian converts and African believers, things can be very, very tricky. Add to that the fact that the young adults group is made up almost completely of African Kenyan brothers and sisters, and the complications go even further. So we have had the fun task of trying to listen to these guys’ experiences to date, positive and negative, within the church, and to make a plan for going forward that includes traditional activities like studying God’s word, and less traditional ones, like learning more about Asian culture.

Two things that have emerged powerfully for me: first, that the Biblically rooted vision for reconciliation between different socio-economic groups is attractive; the world really does know us (or not know us) by our love, and these young Christians who could go to churches that preach and sing only in their home languages and that are just less complicated in general, come and stay at New City because the gospel is doing things they haven’t seen done before. How beautiful is that? Second, we’ve learned that reconciliation is long and hard and difficult . . . and very worth doing. Nobody at our church, and least of all us outsiders, has “arrived;” but for Rebecca and I it has been a big step forward in our journey towards understanding what Desmond Tutu called “the rainbow people of God.”

And The Rest

And then there’s all the other stuff: I got to preach on John 15 a couple of weeks ago, Rebecca ran a bake sale to raise money for a women’s retreat and then led some great games at the retreat, and both of us have gotten to lead our Friday night discussion group on occasion.

More and more we’re seeing that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed planted in soil that varies dramatically from place to place, culture to culture, economic class to economic class. It makes the Christian life lived among people who don’t look like you painful and problematic. It also creates a garden full of all the diversity of the flowers of the field. We’ve gotten a taste of what the gospel looks like planted in the Hindu soil, in the Muslim soil, in the African soil. This has been among the richest of our experiences here; we hope God is using us at New City, but more than that the church has been an incubator for kingdom growth in our life and marriage. I want to challenge all of us to pursue times of worship and fellowship with people whose lives are dramatically different from ours, not as some sort of “let’s outreach to those people over there” movement, but as a way to get a bigger look at the kingdom of God.

Peace,

Michael